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WASM currently does not have a GC but that's precisely why one is needed. Languages that target WASM need to implement their own GC but there's already a proposal to integrate a GC implementation into WASM[1].

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/master/proposals/gc/O...

As Wikipedia says of ml (meta language) languages in general:

"Its types and pattern matching make it well-suited and commonly used to operate on other formal languages, such as in compiler writing, automated theorem proving and formal verification."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)

Algebraic data structures are really nice for representing ASTs and intermediate languages. And a compiler lends itself very well to functional programming, because what you ultimately want is just a function that takes the input code and produces the output code.

It's an extremely high-level language that compiles to extremely low-level fast code (except GC).